Recipes That Should Have Your Children Taken By The Authorities #2 - Cheese Curry

Melt the butter in a saucepan and fry the onion to a golden brown. Add the flour and curry powder and stir over a gentle heat. Add the stock gradually, stirring thoroughly until the sauce thickens. Fold in sultanas and cheese. Cook rice in boiling salted until just soft. Drain and dry. Garnish curry with egg and serve with rice.

I was speechless when I first saw this recipe. I honestly thought I had read it incorrectly but no, it really is a recipe for cheese curry in the unbelievably awful The Great Big New Book of Cheese Recipes which Taxloss so lovingly presented to me as a surprise gift recently. It's not that big - about the size of a CD case. The recipes though disgusting and disturbing, aren't that new (pages 46 - 60 are devoted to variations of cheese on toast.)

A cheese cookbook could be a useful thing to have if it doubles as a guide to the thousands of different cheeses out there: what wines to accompany, how best to cook and store the various types, where to find the best etc.

This book only acknowledges one type of cheese for fuck's sake - cheddar. And it's always grated, in every nasty, stomach-churning recipe.

The preface to the book proselytizes cheese with and in everything:

Say cheese louder and in more exciting ways. Have cheese, have friends, have fun.

3 comments:

Mmmm, what's disturbing me most is that my first, instinctual reaction was "Oh, that sounds nice, I might have to try it" -- you know, just in case it IS good after all. And it does have four of my favourite ingredients: curry powder, cheese, sultanas and eggs.

Heh. If you haven't puked by the time you've finished cooking, you certainly will have by the time you've served it up - seriously, what you bring up might be better than what you cook up from this book!

Actually i find the concept of cheese curry rather exciting - after all, it's only paneer masala (paneer being as we all know, the delicious Indian cottage cheese). it's the sultanas that confuse me - and the fact that it's made with cheddar and not paneer, the delicious Indian cottage cheese.

also i am confused about pages 46-60 being 'variations of cheese on toast' - i don't see how you could improve on the king of suppers, cheese on toast, in any way, so i can only assume that these 15 pages are devoted entirely to an essay on the deliciousness of cheese on toast and a discussion of the pros and cons of adding ketchup (the use of worcestershire sauce is, of course, a given, especially now that i've discovered a vegetarian version).

Prince Charming and I found ourselves in Cheddar Gorge quite by accident the other day. It was beautiful.